


The Origins of Alice

by Rizandace



Series: Immortality AU [8]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Multi, The Old Guard AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29809782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizandace/pseuds/Rizandace
Summary: Short snippets on the theme of Alice: her origins, her relationships with her family, her many adventures. Set in the universe ofA Comet Pulled From Orbit, contains major spoilers for that story.
Relationships: Kady Orloff-Diaz/Alice Quinn, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz/Alice Quinn
Series: Immortality AU [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105883
Comments: 16
Kudos: 17





	1. On Anticipation

There was no way to prepare for something like this. There was simply nothing she could do, nothing she could write down, no refinements she could make, that would help her to be more ready for what the morning would bring.

Alice hated that very much, of course.

Her life, in the last year, had taken several unexpected turns, bumping up against each other and cascading down like a waterfall, leaving a new person at the bottom of the crashing waves. A better person, a person Alice _liked_ more than she’d liked the old version of herself, but one she didn’t know particularly well yet.

And this newest change, the one happening tomorrow, was the most terrifying of all. Because dying, learning of her immortality, meeting her new family, getting kidnapped, etcetera, those things had come out of nowhere, had ripped her to pieces with no warning. She’d had no _time_ to be terrified.

The worst part of it all was the anticipation. Tomorrow, they were rending a hole in the universe, and stepping through to Somewhere Else. And if they’d all done their jobs correctly, if the research and the trial and error and the meticulous calculations were correct, they would be finding Penny Adiyodi on the other side of the chaos.

And she knew it was coming. Could feel it getting ever closer, with every second that slipped by. And she’d already done _everything she could do_ to prepare for it.

Tonight, in the grips of the waiting, she wanted to be with her favorite people. But at the same time, she didn’t know how to behave around them.

Kady was in a state, hardly able to speak, barely acknowledging Alice’s existence, which—well, she wouldn’t pretend it didn’t hurt, but she understood. Eliot was hardly in better shape: he and Quentin had hidden themselves away in their own private universe, like they so often did in times of stress. That left her with only Margo and Julia for company on this night of heart-pounding anticipation. Margo was pretending she wasn’t worried, and Julia was… well, Julia seemed to actually _not_ be worried, which was just so typical of her, to treat this like anything else, with optimism but also the pragmatism to know that if they failed, they could always try again.

The magic was sound, their theories well-supported. But one thing nobody had been able to tell her with any sort of certainty was what it would be _like_. To meet him, the man she’d seen in pictures and in dreams, the one she’d heard stories about, at first wistful remembrances of one long gone, and then stories coated in excitement so strong it was almost dread, with the new awareness that Penny might get to tell Alice some of these stories in his own words, one day.

“He’ll love you,” Julia had said, and Quentin had agreed, and Kady—Kady hadn’t _dis_ agreed, which was something. But what did that even mean? Penny had been gone for five decades. What did any of them really know about who he would be when they found him? How he’d react to getting yanked back into the world he’d lost? Kady had been on the verge of starting something new with Alice when the revelation of Penny’s continued existence had put everything on pause. What if Penny had done the same? Found someone else, someone he loved? What if he was angry at their arrival, affronted that they dare disrupt the peace he’d built for himself?

Or what if he was overjoyed to see Kady, what if he pulled her to him, kissed her, and she forgot the existence of a person named Alice Quinn entirely? Was she _stupid_ , for still holding out hope that the connection she felt with Kady might mean anything, in the face of Penny’s return?

“Stop panicking,” Margo ordered, and it helped because listening to Margo usually proved to be the best idea at any given time. “He’s an asshole but a total softy. Like Kady but with a dick. You’ll get along swimmingly.”

Kady wasn’t an asshole. At least, not in Alice’s limited experience of knowing her. She was gentle and patient and understanding, and this was yet _another_ thing Alice couldn’t plan for, couldn’t prepare to face, the thought that maybe she’d been falling in love with a version of Kady Adiyodi that wouldn’t even exist anymore after tomorrow, that maybe the person Kady would become with Penny back at her side wasn’t one Alice would even recognize.

A year ago, she hadn’t known any of them existed, and in moments of swirling uncertainty like this one, she almost wished she could go back to a time when things were simpler. Not _good_ , in fact, quite objectively _bad_ , but at least _simple_. Knowable. Quantifiable and easy to plan for.

On this night at the start of the rest of forever, Alice found herself sitting on the couch in El and Quentin’s Scotland cottage. This house was ground zero for all their preparations, the place they all collapsed in bed at the end of each grueling day of planning. It had come to feel like home to her in a way that nowhere else had, and it helped to have the familiar warmth of friends beside her in her time of crisis, even if those friends were being far too cheerful for her taste at the moment.

“What do I say to him?” she asked, and Julia and Margo were both quiet for a long time, long enough that she wondered if they’d answer her at all.

“You’ll know,” Julia said. “You’ll know what to say when it’s time to say it.” Then she shrugged, patting Alice on the knee and shifting into a more cajoling tone of voice. “I mean, the first thing you say to him is _run, Penny, run, we’ve got a portal open but it’s unstable as shit. Follow me if you want to live._ ”

“He’s never seen that movie,” Alice said, nonsensically.

“Adding it to the list,” Julia said, making a mental note with a tap of her finger to her temple. “The point is, Alice, this is a rescue mission. Let’s focus on that part of it before we start worrying about the fallout.”

“If you’re worried about Kady,” Margo said, which was kind of cruel of her considering that was quite _obviously_ what Alice was most worried about, “you don’t need to be. He’s watched me and Jules both fuck his wife plenty of times. He’s not going to run screaming at the thought of another pretty girl in the mix.”

“You are _so_ unhelpful,” Julia informed Margo so that Alice didn’t have to. But she tilted her head towards Alice, conspiratorial. “But she’s also kind of right.”

“It’s too _weird_ ,” Alice said, burying her face in her hands.

“I would have thought you’d have gotten used to that by now,” Margo said.

But she hadn’t, and she never would. This was only one adventure, and she knew there’d be others. She’d spend the rest of what was shaping up to be an extremely, unreasonably long life experiencing new things over and over, never able to fully prepare for every contingency, never knowing for sure what the next stretch of her life would contain. Alice was still getting used to that, to not hating it, to finding the joy in it.

Alice would meet Penny tomorrow, barring unforeseen catastrophe. It was going to happen, and then what happened next would happen, and it was unknowable, and that was okay. In the chaos of his return, Alice was sure that she’d be the last thing on his mind. It would take him weeks, months, _years_ , maybe, to even bother to notice her at all.

And by then she’d have had a chance to study him, to know who he was now, and how it might be between them, how they both might fit into this family. If nothing else, after tomorrow, she’d have new givens with which to prepare.


	2. On Blindness

They healed quickly, but ‘quickly’ was a very imprecise term when you were in the middle of feeling the pain. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. A small cut would seal itself up before Alice’s eyes, almost before she’d registered the small nip of it. A blunt impact would throb for a minute or so and then vanish, and no bruise would ever form.

Alice, analytical person that she was, had the perverse desire to catalogue her own recovery time, and that of the others. Did El heal slower, or faster, given the amount of time his body had continued to regenerate itself? How did different magical signatures work within bodies frozen in time? But to indulge in these topics of research would be too eerily familiar, too like what Marina’s people had done to them during Alice’s very first week as an immortal. She couldn’t be a lab rat just yet, not even if she were the scientist as well.

But as with all things, magic and healing and eternal life ended up being a lot more complicated than recovering from every physical wound. She’d gotten her first real taste of this obvious truth one day in the middle of a job.

As far as Alice had been able to determine over the past several years, there were two main categories of missions that Margo tended to take on. One was to protect people from other people, and the other was to prevent people from getting their hands on some kind of weapon or magic that might do great harm.

This was the latter category, essentially a race to acquire an ancient sword that could kill and bind from a distance. All very mythical, the kind of thing Alice had once learned about with distant curiosity in a classroom, but now found herself bumping up against in real life.

Their enemies were fierce, talented, clever and wily, and while at the end of the day they had managed to prevent any of the wrong hands from falling on the sword, Alice had paid a temporary, but deeply traumatic price.

She hadn’t even realized it, at first. The room they were fighting in had been pitch black, only the blurry light of magic filling the room in sporadic bursts as they cast spells, pushing and pulling, protecting and preventing. Alice’s job had been to crouch in the corner and protect the sword, keep it safe until Penny could reach her to Travel it away.

There was a _whoosh_ of magic being cast close at hand, and Alice felt something tingle across her scalp. And then… well, she couldn’t see. Couldn’t tell if anything had happened. It wasn’t until she heard footsteps, and felt a hand on her arm, that she realized that the fighting hadn’t died down, that there were still bursts of magic surrounding her, and that she could no longer see the colorful flashes of light that should have accompanied them. She blinked, uncomprehending.

“Alice?”

It was Penny, low and concerned. “Are you okay? We’ve got to move.”

“I can’t see,” she told him, still trying to process the reality of this herself. “Pen, I can’t— _see_.”

Penny didn’t understand at first, moving around her and plucking the hilt of the sword up through Alice’s protective magic. She’d let it fall when she realized he was close.

“Let’s get somewhere with electricity, then,” he said, and, as per the plan, he grabbed her by the shoulder, and Traveled.

She felt it, the pressure and pull of magic whisking her away. In an abstract, dreamlike state, she wondered what she usually saw when she Traveled. She couldn’t really remember processing a lot of visual stimuli in the past, but she noticed the absence of it now. When they landed, she knew she was safe back in the hotel suite they were using as a base of operations, because she could feel the carpet under her shoes, could smell the crisp cleanness of the space, intermingled with Eliot’s cologne.

But she couldn’t _see_.

“Alice,” Penny said. “Are you…” he trailed off, because asking _are you hurt_ would have been pointless.

“I’m—I can’t _see_ ,” she repeated, and this time the truth of it cracked through her, terror making her legs wobble and her breath catch in her throat.

“Shit,” Penny said, and then he was touching her, a hand on her elbow, guiding her. She followed without thinking, guided by his warmth close by her side. By the time he had her sitting on the edge of the bed, she could hear the others arriving through the portal.

“What the fuck, Adiyodi,” Margo said, her voice loud and ringing, and Alice could picture the irritated expression on her face but she couldn’t _see_ anything… “what happened to coming back for the rest of us?”

“Alice?” That was Kady, and Alice flinched a little at the nearness of her voice. Margo’s loudness had muffled the sound of Kady’s approach.

“What happened?” That was Eliot, his voice pitched in concern. “Alice?”

“Can’t see,” she said again, and realized it was the only thing she’d said since it happened. No other words seemed important. _Can’t see. Can’t see. Blind_. _Can’t see_.

“Okay, I’m doing a Mann Reveal on you right now,” Penny said, voice low and comforting. “Just to figure out what’s going on. I’m going to let go of your arm—no, hey, it’s okay, Kady’s right here....”

She felt as useless as a ragdoll, passed between one set of hands and into another. She could feel the almost oppressive closeness as the others crowded around, questions shouted, admonishments. Who had done this, who had missed it? Whose job had it been to make sure that Alice didn’t get hit by a _blinding_ spell in the middle of the most critical part of their mission?

Alice resented that, wanted to tell them that she hadn’t needed a babysitter, could look after herself, but her current predicament, the utter _nothing_ of the world around her, told a different story, didn’t it?

“Give her some space,” Kady said, close to her ear. She was sitting beside Alice on the bed, holding tight to one of her hands. She heard and felt the shifting of bodies as the others obeyed, and then it was just Kady, gripping tight to her to keep her from floating away, and Penny, crouched in front of her, casting, diagnosing. He placed one hand, gentle, on her knee when it was done.

“I recognize this,” he said, very slowly. “It’s temporary. It’ll wear off within an hour.”

An hour seemed impossibly long, longer than eternity.

“Maybe you could try and sleep?” Kady suggested.

Alice unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “We got the sword, right?”

A gentle huff of laughter from across the room. That was Quentin. “Yeah, love,” Penny said. “We got the sword, we got out. Everyone’s okay.”

“This is really freaking me out,” she said, and felt a dryness to her eyes, realized she must be holding them open, like widening them beneath her glasses would make the world pop back into sight. She blinked her eyes several times, hating the way it changed nothing about what she saw.

“I bet,” Kady said. “Here, just come up here with us.”

Penny pulled her shoes off for her. Alice bristled at being treated like a child, but she found that letting go of Kady’s hand, of moving her limbs on her own, reaching toward the world without being able to see it, was beyond her at the moment. Blind people did it every day, but it was different when it came on by magic, when there was nothing physical to heal, when the malice of another person ripped away something you depended on in the blink of an… eye. So to speak.

She couldn’t hear the others anymore. They must have gone through to the other room, left her with Penny and Kady alone. She should have been grateful that whoever had got off that curse hadn’t managed it twenty minutes earlier. That she’d lost her sight at the very tail-end of everything, right when the mission was ending, right when escape was near at hand. She tried to imagine being in the field, surrounded by spells, responsible for protecting the whole point of the job, and unable to see what she was doing.

“Thank you,” she said, and she closed her eyes as Kady and Penny maneuvered her up into the bed, got her lying down with her head on a pillow. It helped, to be horizontal. It helped to keep her eyes closed.

And it helped that Penny and Kady stayed, without Alice needing to ask.

For the next hour, Alice did not sleep. She did not speak. She just thought, long and hard, about every spell she’d ever performed, or even heard of, that could hurt a person without cutting into them. That could freeze them in place or put them to sleep or take away one or more of their senses. She realized with shame that she’d taken to the invulnerability of her new life with too little caution, that she’d fallen straight into a trap that many of the others had tried to warn her against.

The world could still hurt you, even if you couldn’t die. Probably it could even hurt you worse. She wouldn’t forget it again. But life had its little rewards, the things that made it worth the rest. When the curse wore off, she blinked her eyes open to find the two people she liked best in the world, by her side and smiling.


End file.
